Chapter Sixteen
The man behind the wheel of the squat black van was not fond of driving for its own sake, even in the rolling dairy-lands of the Westcountry that contrasted so strongly with the utilitarian, arable flatness that surrounded Flaxborough. He glared despondently through the windscreen at the unpredictable road ahead, snaking between high banks bearing their rain-heavy tangle of dead cow-parsley, vetch and spear grass. To his companion he said not a word.
It was still light enough to see Glee Hill crouching like a lonely old sheep dog in the mist away to the left. On the near side of it, a small forest of skeletal trees held tapering, motionless fingers against the slate-coloured sky. The occasional road-side cottage, withdrawn against a leafless, dripping orchard or standing amidst a forlorn garden of soured, broken potato plants and stripped orussel stalks, showed no sign of occupancy. Here was a landscape gone to seed and bedded down to rot quietly until spring.
At the next cross-roads, Dr Hillyard steered the van carefully to a stop against the verge and studied a map. He also drank gratefully from a silver flask and lit a cigarette. Then he checked the map with the signpost and drove off into the right-hand turn.
The road descended steeply through a dank plantation and drew level beside a stream. This was crossed by a humped bridge that carried the road to the beginnings of a village. Before entering its main street, flanked by a hall, some stone-built houses and a couple of shops with lighted windows, Dr Hillyard chose a sharp left turn and drove slowly past an inn, a farm entrance and a long, low wall that appeared to enclose the grounds of a manor house, the chimneys of which topped a huge yew hedge at the end of some rough pasture.
About half a mile farther on, the road forked. At the junction was a triangular patch of asphalt and on it a telephone kiosk. Again Dr Hillyard pulled up. This time he got out of the van, crossed to the kiosk and entered it. He took a piece of paper from his pocket and compared what was written on it with the dial of the telephone.
Mr Bradlaw watched from his van’s passenger seat. He shivered in the chill dampness that crept through the floorboards and slid round the cab’s windows and doors. His legs tingled and ached. Disentangling them from the rug he had wrapped around him, he opened the door and climbed heavily to the road as Hillyard shouldered his way out of the kiosk.
“Well?” said Bradlaw, stamping his feet.
“That’s the number, all right,” Hillyard said. He stared up one of the roads. “It’ll not be far from here. A cottage is the best bet. Not in the village, though.”
Bradlaw looked unhappily at the sky. “We’ll have to be starting back inside another couple of hours, whether we find anything or not. We should have waited for her coming again and one of us followed her.”
Hillyard ignored this observation. Puckering his face so that his splayed teeth stood out from his mouth like a bundle of piano keys, he goggled searchingly along the left-hand fork. “Not too promising,” he said at last. “We’ll take a look at the other one first. You’d better drive from now.”
They had not gone far, however, before the road narrowed into a lane. Becoming progressively rougher, it eventually petered out into a track, deeply rutted by cart wheels. The only habitation in sight was a group of farm buildings, about a quarter of a mile away. Bradlaw pulled up. “They look a dead loss.” He nodded towards the huddle of barns and outhouses.
“Aye. Well try the other.”
Bradlaw backed the van off the track into the furrowed but firm earth alongside and, with some lurching and several stalls, managed to turn it back towards the junction. “How anyone could live in a bloody wilderness like this...”
“It has its advantages,” observed Hillyard, a trifle bitterly.
The other fork obligingly remained metalled for the first half mile or so and seemed likely to continue. At the first sight of a dwelling, a small two-storey brick house on the left, Bradlaw slowed down almost to a halt. “What do we do? Look in?”
“No. Pull up at the gate and sound the horn. Be ready to drive off as soon as we see who comes out.”
The sudden blare of the hooter rent the silent, moisture-laden air like the cry of an impaled bull. There was an almost immediate scampering and scraping and five children appeared round the side of the house. At the same time, a curtain was drawn back at one of the upper windows and a fat, wild-eyed woman stared out. Bradlaw precipitately let in the clutch and the van shot forward.
“Heaven preserve us!” murmured Hillyard, devoutly.
They had gone nearly as far again before another house came into view. It was a low-built cottage, thatched and ivied to such a degree that its windows were like the eyes of a castaway, peering through hair. The place was only noticeable at all because of the double gates that stood across the path turning in from the road. These were of a sickly sienna, highly varnished.
The cottage, or what could be discerned of it under the multitude of ivy ropes, was of plastered brick. The front door had a porch and a flagged path led through the undergrowth of the neglected garden and round the side of the building. Rank elder bushes, trees almost, crowded to the thatch on the right-hand side. Behind was the dark tracery of a group of tall oaks.
Bradlaw, who had stopped the van level with the incongruous gateway, pointed to a broad, low shed some twenty yards to the left of the cottage. “Garage,” he said.
Both men surveyed the scene from where they sat. Although the light was fading fast, no lamp had been lit in the cottage. Nor was there any smoke from the great ivy-strangled stack.
“Try the horn,” commanded Hillyard tersely.
The bellow echoed from the steep hillside beyond the cottage. There was no response, from children or anyone else.
Hillyard stared intently at the gates, then at the shed. He wound down the window on his side, stuck out his head and looked back along the road, then forward in the direction the van faced.
He opened the door and jumped down. “I’ll take a chance and look inside. You can see far enough both ways to give me a pip if anything comes along.”
Bradlaw looked at him anxiously. “I'd not do that—not just walk up to it. You can’t be sure that nobody’s there.”
Hillyard seemed not to hear. Before opening the gate, he turned and said: “You’d better stand in the road. And for God’s sake don’t forget to sound that blasted hooter if you see a car turn down this road.”
Bradlaw obediently left his seat. Glancing at the tall, lank figure of the doctor already advancing in a sort of athletic creep towards one of the cottage windows, he took up sentry-go for the length of his van. At last, made nervous by the crunch of his own footsteps, he halted and continued the vigil by turning his head this way and that and listening.
Hillyard reached the cottage and peered cautiously over the nearest window-sill. The room within was dark and at first he could distinguish only the pieces of furniture immediately in front of him. There was a console radio and a cabinet on which stood a decanter and glasses. A chair, a small table...As his eyes grew accustomed to the dimness, he picked out a broad maplewood couch, another cabinet of some kind and two pullman armchairs facing the fireplace. The fitted carpet of pale coffee colour was relieved by a single heavy rug in black and turquoise.